QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelOn Fake Scares: Trump’s Wild Claims Notwithstanding, DHS Finds That Illegal Voting by Noncitizens Is Vanishingly Small

Donald Trump, both as a candidate and as president, has been consistent in denigrating the U.S. election system as “rigged,” claiming that one manifestation of this rigging is that “millions” of illegal immigrants have been allowed to vote in blue states.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies charged that the Biden administration was purposely encouraging mass numbers of immigrants to cross the border in order to vote illegally.

With the exception of some of Trump’s more gullible followers, people knew these charges were false. And now, Trump’s own government investigators have concluded – to be more precise: initially concluded — that Trump’s wild claims are baseless.

Trump has instructed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), an agency at DHS, to investigate the issue. DHS urged states to upload voter records through a federal immigration verification tool run out of DHS, and many states did so, uploading tens of millions of voter records.

The New York Times reports:

[W]ith the review underway, the results so far indicate there is no evidence of widespread fraud, according to interviews with government officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations that have been checked, the department referred around 10,000 cases to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation of noncitizenship, or roughly .02 percent of the names processed, according to Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the D.H.S. agency that oversees the program. A Justice Department spokeswoman also said the administration believed around 10,000 registered noncitizen voters had been found.

They did not specify how many of those people had voted.

Even that number could be inflated. The verification tool has mistakenly flagged some people who appear to actually be citizens, according to some local election officials.

Here is one example

In Charlotte County, Fla., for instance, the elections supervisor Leah Valenti, an appointee of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, said she found that just 15 out of 176,000 names she uploaded to D.H.S. came back as noncitizens. Of those, she found that three were people mistakenly added to the rolls who never intended to register to vote; they have since been removed. Two others already sent in documentation to prove their naturalized citizenship, she said.

Ben Frankel is the editor of the Homeland Security News Wire